He had warned her. He had, in fact, warned the High Priestess, Caora Ord, several times, and in the most graphic and horrible of terms that the transitions from one shadow to the next in their searches of the palace grounds would be unpleasant. Caora had still insisted on joining him as Ashe walked determinedly toward the sounds of the mad mage who even now pounded upon the stone of the royal palace with all of the force his Talent could muster. The tall older woman, she was taller than Ashe by half a hand at least, steadily matched the king’s tutor and primary advisor step by steady, long-legged step.
Ashe had never encountered any trouble himself when he did what his uncle, now so far away, had called Walking Through the Darkness Between Realms. If anything, it was a relief to Ashe to move through those dark places. It was as calming to his mind and emotions as it was a balm to his physical being.
He would call upon the very first expression of magic he had ever mastered, this ability to move from place to place by stepping into one deep shadow, and moving himself to another location, stepping out from a shadow in another place as if he moved through a door from one room to another. But between stepping In, and then stepping Out, there was a brief time, a heartbeat or two, where he was in neither place. A lightless void where only Ashe existed.
In those rare occasions where he pulled others along with him, those poor people experienced an icy black nothingness that somehow seeped into their very souls. Those who had moved through that Void exited along with Ashe in a breathless and panicked state. It may have only taken them a moment to move along with Ashe, yet they all thought that they were about to suffocate, and that they had been in the Void for hours. Some few had screamed, thinking that Ashe would let them go, leaving them to rot eternally in that nowhere place.
He had done it only once, letting go of the hand of a duke who his uncle had insisted that Ashe bring directly to him. The man had been insufferable. After Ashe had released him in the Void, the man had stumbled out of the portal, screaming. It had taken the man a full day to stop panicking.
His uncle had been filled with an adamantine wroth for weeks after.
His uncle had a spell much like his own spell. One he had tried to teach it to Ashe. A spell that allowed him to open doors from one fire to another, and step safely between the two.
The man had told him that once, long ago, all people lived in tribes that kept a cookfire going at all times. His uncle had created a spell that allowed him to travel from one tribe’s fire to another’s in the blink of an eye. Though he had learned the spells his uncle gave him to study, and explained how both spells were similar in form and execution, Ashe found his own method easier. More comfortable. Soothing, even. But, unlike his uncle’s spell, Ashe’s was just not as “friendly” a method to bring others along.
He had prepared Caora for this trial as best he was able in the very short time he had been given. And had even warned her that they may have to make several Steps. She had been determined, though.
“I am Arluan’s servant here, and I will see that his Holy Relic is returned to the Temple.” She had told him. Repeatedly.
He now stood beside the tall, frail looking woman, holding her hands in his, trying to warm them as he spoke soothingly to her in a calm, quiet voice. He could see the woman’s body shaking, though he wasn’t certain if it was from cold, which he never felt during these Steps, or with some form of dred, that he also never felt when Walking Through the Darkness.
Her angular, wrinkled face turned up to his, and she said with an almost steady voice,“That was …awful.”
Before he could apologize, she continued with some vehemence. “I mean, you TOLD me it would be bad, but I thought you were just holding a bag of cats and claiming they were lions.”
She took her hands from his, and balled her fists, rubbing them on her upper arms and collar bones, trying to build up some warmth. “Really, young man. I mean…” She shook her head. “That was absolutely horrifying!” Her eyes, a light blue almost pale enough to be called white, bored into him. “And this… THIS is how the mysterious Lord Ashe is able to be everywhere? This is how you go about your day?”
“Yes. Though I don’t usually do this more than once a week. I rarely need to do anything more than just walk, and most people jump and screech as though I did just walk through shadows. I rarely need to rush that much, and most people don’t pay attention to their surroundings.” It was a small lie. He actually Stepped at least twice a day. It was how he got from his chambers, where everyone in the palace knew he lived, to his actual bedroom, where he slept in peace knowing that no one would find and attack him in his sleep.
It was a small, well furnished room he had set up decades before, after several men had tried to kill him in his sleep. The little attic room had tw windows, but no door. He had one of the palace’s stone mason’s build a stone wall over the old door.
“My apologies, its horrors don't affect me.” Was all he could say to Caora as she shivered. He had warned her it would be exactly that bad.
She leaned back from him at that and squinted at him. “Yes. Most people don’t pay attention. That much is true. But, it doesn’t…?” She half asked, as he shook his head somberly.
She may have smiled at him then; he wasn’t certain. “Well, THAT is interesting,” she continued. “Are we there?” She looked around at the room they stood in. It was one of the smaller side rooms near the Eastern Hall. He had chosen it as a probable safe place to Step into.
Edging toward the door he glanced out, expecting to see the roof of the Great Hall ripped away.
Shock must have shown on his gray skinned face, because the priestess asked in a hushed tone, “What do you see?”
“The monsters. The room is filled with the monsters.” Ashe told his companion. “There are two or three that look like the ones I observed earlier, when the king trapped one. I even see the one the king maimed.” He pointed across the broad, ruined, room to one of the hulking beasts who was missing an arm. “The king’s scepter did that.”
Caora scuttled forward in a hunched gate, trying to remain unseen by the horrors in the Great Hall. There were, indeed, the three lumbering giants wandering through the wreckage of the room, screeching in apparent joy whenever they came across the remains of some poor soul who had turned up to attend the king’s address to the populace.
The creatures were eating the remains. Tearing huge wet pieces from the bodies they found. At other times, she saw, the things would pull pieces of the dead apart, stripping skin from the muscle and bone, using the red prizes to add to their own twisted bodies.
One contorted creature held what looked like the skinned lower leg of a corpse in one giant paw, and with the other paw they slit open their own lower leg and held open the wound while shoving the acquired piece into the wound. The wound then closed around the new muscle and bone, and they could see the thing’s leg shift and widen as the new part added to the mass, and reinforced the giant, twisted leg.
While its leg reconfigured itself, the thing noisily consumed the skin it had stripped away from the orphaned limb. It made a loud slurping noise that showed how poorly adapted its muzzle-like maw was for eating the slippery, wet, noisome treat. Every few handspans of the pulpy skin that slid down its throat the beast would stop, and shake its head, spraying blood and gobbets about it in a gorey rain. Its jaws working furiously to macerate the fleshy sleeve with sharp, wet choking noises.
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Caora turned from the door, and ran to the back corner of the room. Ashe felt he should offer her some help, but well before he could, she was noisily ill.
It went on for a solid three hundred count by Ashe’s reckoning.
There was a tearing noise, and Caora stalked back over to Ashe, an improvised rag torn from her robe was being used to wipe the filth from her face and hands before she threw it behind her.
“Now,” she began. “What will we do now, my Lord Ashe?” Caora was mad, Ashe could see. It went beyond the loss of life represented by what was in that room, and maybe it was in defense of her God and Temple, but he wasn’t certain.
“We still need to find the mage using these things.” He said, carefully watching the carnage from just inside the doorframe.
He looked. And then he stared. Whatever he had expected to see, Ashe was not finding it, and was growing more concerned. He closed his eyes, and Delved. Stretching out his senses through the use of his Talent and Will, to encompass the whole of the Eastern Wing of the palace. He could feel the almost rhythmic repetitions of the strikes against the walls, shattering stones and breaking mortared joints that had held together for centuries until this assault. He could see, intimately, the carnage and gore going on in the Great Hall, and turned away from the horror and waste of it all. Finally his mind drifted to the spell, as he looked for its master. And rage boiled through his frame with more force than he had been prepared. He felt his face darken as blood rushed to his cheeks, and his scalp began to heat and itch with the outrage of it all.
He released the Delving, and recentered himself in a flicker of his eyelids.
“He’s not here.”
“What?!” She was shocked, even as the sound of another great booming shock rocked the palace roof above.
“He’s not here. I can’t feel him. It’s like he set this spell in motion, and tied it off. It’s a repeating spell at this point, with no one directing it. I’ve never seen a tied off spell this large before. But, that’s what happened. Wherever he has gone, he’s not in that room, nor just outside of it.”
“What do you mean ‘tied it off?’” She was hissing, but were there not monsters on the other side of the wall against which they now leaned, he knew she might be yelling. Her high, sharply angular cheeks were flushing as she looked at him with wide eyes.
Ashe was confused. He had been under the impression that priests of the various faiths were all Talents, and had been trained in the magic schools most closely associated with their faiths. “Well… hrrm…” He started, and then restarted. Finally, he just asked her, “Priestess, are you a Talent?”
She looked shocked at him, and on the verge of anger. But, then looked sheepish, and exhaled long and loud. “I am, but I’m such a minor Talent that it scarcely matters. I rarely do anything more impressive than light the candles in the Temple every morning. My tutors feared I would never amount to anything of notre due to my weakness.”
“Ah.” He hadn’t been expecting this level of candor any more than he had the i=dea that she was untalented. “Well, when you cast to light a candle, you use a basic Furnia spell?”
The priestess nodded. “Yes. I form the thought, align my Will, and cast a minor Furnia, igniting the wicks of each candle. And sometimes the firepot in my quarters.”
“Well, were you to cast a minor Furnia,” with a minor gesture, Ashe held out his left hand where a small flame sat a finger’s length above his palm. “Now, if I take the lines of my Will that animate this casting, and tie them off as though I am creating a small Artifact, like this.” With that, she felt a twisting of his casting, and the flame flickered briefly.
Ashe lowered his hand, and the little flame stayed in the spot where he had conjured it. Caora’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“What… how…?” She shifted her gaze back and forth between Ashe and the little hovering flame.
“It’s not a common usage. Mosty this is taught to Crafters, who need to constantly practice the Tie to master making Artifacts, and…” He paused now. And sighed. “War Mages. Wizards and sorcerers trained in the arts of war.”
She looked now at Ashe with surprise. “Who trains the Talented for war? That would lead to monstrous casualties in any conflict!” Again, she was hissing at him rather than yelling.
“My lady, there are at least two kingdoms overseas that have been at each other’s throats for a decade now. I’ve heard that Hamuria is beginning to sue for peace, but Velspe will refuse.”
“For Arluan’s love, why?”
Ashe smiled ruefully. “Ego. Greed. Take your pick. One side wants land, but says the other side is evil and practices vile rituals to unholy demons. The other side remembers a time when the two kingdoms were but two small states that were a part of a bigger Kingdom, and now they want revenge for slights delivered from ancestors long since passed away to ancestors equally long departed. Much like Rhiada’s war with Hengest, some fifty years gone.”
“Hengest tried to kill us all! I was here when their ships landed at South Wall!” Her anger was making her words rise in volume.
Ashe held up his hands. “It’s just an example, Caora. And I was here for that war, too. The point is people will go to war for whatever they can convince others to go to war for. Hengest had no actual claim on South Wall, no matter how many genealogies they produce to say the Duchess South Wall is descended from Arbast the Wise.”
“What?” she almost squeaked. “Is THAT what they were saying?”
“Yes.” Ashe said solemnly. “And they sent three thousand of their people to die trying to claim the land for their own. The Duchess lost her husband in that invasion. Her son was born fatherless. And so were the sons of at least a thousand other young women that first year of the war. But, this is roving far and wide from the original point.”
“And what point was that?” She asked.
He looked very calm, his gray face composed and stoic, as he said, “That the mage we are hunting was more than likely trained in warfare, and to use magic to kill in many efficient ways. He tied off his wall-breaking spell, and then wandered off to pursue something else. He’s set his spell, it’s doing big, loud, mad damage, drawing us here. And yet now he is off chasing some other goal while we founder on the waves behind him.”
With that, Ashe stood, and with an offered hand to Caora, he drew her along with himself into a shadow as he pursued the mad mage.
He thought he might know where the monster maker was headed.
“Wait!”
Ashe stood one foot inside of the Shadow, the other in the dimly torchlit room. “What?”
“We cannot leave these things! Look at them! We leave them to roam loose, and they will devour the palace and everyone in it before dawn!”
Ashe was irritated. “We have our orders. I have to stop that mage.”
“How many will die because you let the lions go to catch the liontamer? Think, man! THINK! Do you want Myrl to face that room of creatures?” She was getting breathless with the exertions of her argument, all the while attempting to not actually yell at him for fear of calling attention to themselves from the next room.
He could see her point. And it irritated him.
He stepped fully back into the room. and stared through the door into the Great Hall. She watched as Ashe narrowed his eyes, and strode to the door.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” she hissed at his retreating back.
Stepping into the Hall, Ashe let loose a shrill, incredibly loud whistle. It went on for far too long, and Caora thought her ears would start to bleed before he stopped. But then it abruptly ended.
The silence that rushed in to fill the void left when the whistle stopped was, itself, deafening. Almost a physical force all its own.
Through the door, every creature now stood in dumb incomprehension, staring at Ashe where he now stood in the open door.
He flung his arms out wide, and then spoke a word the elderly priestess had never heard before. A flash of sickly green light moved out from the Gray Lord, his clothing tinted by the hue.
He turned abruptly back to Caora, and swept toward her in a rush. Before she knew what was happening, they were through the thick shadow in the corner, Caora screaming in terror as the darkness consumed her thoughts.
The last glimpse she had of the Great Hall through the door included at least eight copies of Lord Ashe, in various different sizes, all charging at one another, looks of rage etched on their many copies of his gray skinned face.